Quotes from Helen Rappaport

We lived side by side with life but were afraid of meeting it. (Maria Pavlovna)

B)ut behind it all-- nothing: just vodka and the void. (Coco Chanel)

Que faire?' became proverbial among the émigré community in Paris, because it encapsulated their sense of hopelessness and the Russian fatalistic attitude toward life.

The mysterious healer was a strannik – a semi-literate, thirty-seven-year-old lay pilgrim – named Grigory Rasputin, who had been gaining a reputation in St Petersburg as a mystic and healer since his arrival there during Lent 1903.

When the soul is dead and the body is the only concern, there's not much to get excited about...the only thing alive for me now is our literature.

T)here was no missing the enormous irony of the fact that from Russia--"a country where her poems were needed, like bread, she had ended up in a country where nobody needed her or anyone else's poems. Even Russian people in emigration ceased to need them," Tsvetaeva said, "And that made Russian poets miserable.

Anecdotes are funny when you tell them," said Teffi. "But when you live through them it's a tragedy. And my life is one big joke-- in other words, a tragedy.

Who else is there to marry?' she asked a friend; she at least had the great good fortune to be marrying for love.

The tsar twice went to visit Stolypin again, but on both occasions Stolypin's wife Olga, blaming him for the attack, refused to allow Nicholas to see him.45 On 5 September Stolypin died of sepsis and Olga Stolypina declined to accept the tsar's condolences. With martial law declared in Kiev and 30,000 troops on alert, fears spread of an anti-Jewish pogrom in retaliation, prompting many of the Jewish residents to flee the city.

for the youngest Romanov daughter was a force of nature to whose presence it was impossible to remain indifferent. Even

the October Revolution of 1917 brought seismic changes to the city. In November, the 'agitators' arrived and with the support of local railway workers staged a Bolshevik coup d'état. This was swiftly followed by industrial and financial crisis as the city fell into debt and bankruptcy. Then followed arrests, shootings, confiscations and fear.

The wish to capture evanescent reflections, is not only impossible, as has been shown by thorough German Investigation, but the mere desire alone, the will to do so, is blasphemy. God created man in His own image, and no man-made machine may fix the image of God. Is it possible that God should have abandoned His eternal principles, and allowed a Frenchman in Paris to give to the world an invention of the Devil

It was another six years, however – and only after considerable and protracted legal wrangling – before the Russian Prosecutor General's office finally saw fit to rehabilitate Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia Romanova, their parents and brother, as 'victims of political repressions'.

I would do anything," he said in quiet desperation, "even going to prison, if she could only be well again.

Instead of avoiding attention they invited it

But Ulyanov had learned an important lesson from his misguided hero worship of Plekhanov. From here on he would exorcise all personal feeling in his political dealings and trust nobody. One had, as he put it, to 'keep a stone in one's sling'.

political change in Russia could come through parliamentary politics and unionisation of the workers in a campaign for social reform, economic freedom, better pay and conditions. Such thinking – suggesting conciliation with capitalism and the monarchy – enraged Ulyanov,

These arguments were, in his eyes, 'reactionary'; they subverted his insistence on relentless class war leading to the violent overthrow of the tsarist order.

photographers at the time often rubbed their fingers with solid lumps of cyanide to remove silver nitrate stains.

Life', Alice resolutely told her mother in 1866, 'is meant for work, and not for pleasure.

love of power and his dealing so contemptuously with people once he had fallen out with them.38 In Ulyanov's view, Struve had betrayed orthodox Marxism with the 'bourgeois apologetics' of his conciliatory, legal Marxism. He was nothing but 'a politico, an artful dodger, a huckster, and an impudent boor

And like Lot's wife, I am frozen. I have turned into a pillar of salt forever, and I shall forever go on looking, seeing my own land slip softly, slowly away from me.

Anyone who did not master conspiratorial techniques was considered a kustar' – an amateur; amateurism was anathema to Ulyanov and he was obsessive in eradicating

mayor de la zarina y encargada de cuidar del palacio tras su partida, las hambrientas criaturas emergieron de entre las sombras como si de espectros se tratara y se lanzaron sobre ella buscando su atención. Pero las cuarenta puertas de las habitaciones interiores donde estaban los animales se habían sellado. En el desierto parque Alexander solo quedaban los gatos: el último remanente de una familia que ya se había adentrado cientos de kilómetros en Siberia oriental.